Cross-chain bridge risks persist: $900M losses since 2026 and why traders must verify approvals
Web3 security remains under pressure despite lower market activity. Since 2026, Web3 incidents have caused over $900M cumulative losses, with cross-chain bridge events accounting for 16+ incidents and about $330M lost. The article cites examples: Gravity Bridge was allegedly attacked due to contract key/signature authorization issues (≈$5.4M stolen), and Alephium TokenBridge suffered an Ethereum cross-chain vulnerability attack (≈$815K stolen) and minted large amounts of unbacked Wrapped ALPH.
The core trading takeaway is that cross-chain bridges concentrate high-value permissions and complex trust assumptions: locked/held assets, signer/guardian validation, cross-chain message verification, and bridging backend infrastructure. Failures in signing keys, guardian thresholds, message validation, or contract permission design can enable unauthorized execution—without the user leaking a seed phrase or even signing a clearly malicious transaction.
Actionable precautions emphasized for traders: always enter cross-chain bridge sites via official channels (avoid social-engineering phishing), check for recent attack/abnormal announcements, test with small amounts first, avoid infinite token approvals, and carefully review signature/transaction details. After bridging, verify on explorers on both source and destination chains and regularly clean up lingering approvals.
Separately, the article stresses that “people get hacked” via phishing, malicious approvals, counterfeit pages, and device-level malware—making cross-chain bridge security a mix of infrastructure risk and user-operation hygiene.
Bearish
This is a risk-focused report rather than a market catalyst, but it points to repeated cross-chain bridge failures and large, concrete losses (>$330M tied to bridges since 2026). That can depress risk appetite for cross-chain and wrapped-assets exposure, increase volatility around bridging events, and lead traders to temporarily reduce positions until contracts/guardians/approvals are validated.
In the short term, traders are likely to price in higher probability of bridge-related exploits and social-engineering attacks, favoring smaller test transfers, tighter approval limits, and more manual verification—often resulting in lower liquidity and wider spreads for bridge-adjacent tokens. In the long term, repeated high-profile incidents typically accelerate the shift toward better permissioning, more conservative signer/guardian designs, and stricter approval hygiene, which can be mildly constructive for the ecosystem but still weighs on near-term sentiment.
Similar historical patterns include recurring bridge hacks followed by temporary drawdowns in affected ecosystems and a renewed wave of security scrutiny and user behavior changes.